Blue Origin Thread (merged)

[kerbiloid]

9 minutes ago, softweir said:

Were Mr and/or Mrs Musk fans of von Braun's writings?

Or he tries to return to home.

[Frozen_Heart]

5 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

I think it's a hell of a leap to go from an up-and-down landing demonstrator to the third largest rocket in History. I would have felt more comfortable if he had gone for a Soyuz-class orbital launcher before going full-scale. It's in total contradiction with "Gradatim Ferociter".

But I wish them luck.

I suspect they have made some type of deal with ULA, to not compete in the same payload class as Vulcan.

[tater]

The Vulcan observation @Frozen_Heart makes is a good one.

I recall Bezos talking about landing in an interview and saying that bigger doesn't make it harder (he was clearly poking at Musk), so he was telegraphing this. 

Take R-7. In terms of payload to LEO it was mentioned above. That LV has what, 32 engines burning at liftoff (20 for main thrust, and 12 for directional control). 7 Be-4s is not more complicated than that. Bigger is really just bigger, I'm not sure if it's any harder, honestly. I think that stepping up in size has a lot more to do with risk mitigation, and risk is just money for an unmanned rocket.

[tater]

 

Clearly they must have some idea what happened. (guess not)

Edited September 14, 2016 by tater

[Kryten]

43 minutes ago, tater said:

 

Clearly they must have some idea what happened.

Apparently not.

Quote

 

Peter B. de Selding ‏@pbdes  4m4 minutes ago

SpaceX's Shotwell: Nov return to flight is our best hope. We still haven't isolated the cause or whether its origin was rocket or ground.

Edited September 13, 2016 by Kryten

[tater]

Ah, saw the link at NSF and posted it. They don't know if it was S2 or a GSE problem? Jeez. That puts to rest the notion that they have a couple clues to rub together.

[wumpus]

Bigger might not be harder, but it likely makes learning more expensive.  The delta-v on the booster stage is almost certainly far beyond anything the New Shepard had to deal with.  Presumably they are launching from the cape, have they announced if they are landing on land or at sea?  New Shepard only had to deal with vertical velocity and barely controlled horizontal in either direction.  New Glenn will have to control in at least one horizontal direction as well (and hit a target while moving fast, they hit the earlier target dead on but with little movement away from it).

The economics make things more interesting.  Spacex put 19 boosters in the ocean before managing to recover their first one (and they still haven't launched a landed  booster).  If recovering boosters is the goal, I'd expect to go smaller in the idea that you can learn faster with cheaper boosters.  If launching large amounts of tonnage into space is the key, bigger is better and keep dumping the boosters until you learn how to land them.  Spacex almost certainly built the falcon 9 that size to allow sufficient cargo to pay for the landing attempts (throwing more tonnage to space is pointless if you don't have the customers).  If Blue Origin is less concerned with customers, then bigger is better.

One thing you shouldn't forget about are launch costs.  DC-X made huge strides in reducing launch costs and these probably carried over into New Shepard.  I suspect that once you start launching at the cape, NASA will inflict their customary cost schedule on you, and expect to pay nearly the cost of a Falcon 9 booster just to launch into orbit.  This means that once you manage to recover a big booster, your relative costs (costs/ton) are going to go way down (assuming the launch costs are mostly similar to go into orbit.  I suspect manned costs will balloon again, but that is unavoidable).

To be honest, I suspect that the choice of size was entirely driven by ego.  Given that all sizes were effectively on the table, Bezos went with the big one.  It would take a lot of smaller rockets to justify an intermediate stage if you are really interested in the big cargoes, but if you wind up dumping 19 into the drink then a smaller prototype rocket makes sense (even if you don't have paying customers due to contracts with ULA).

[Kryten]

1 minute ago, wumpus said:

 Presumably they are launching from the cape, have they announced if they are landing on land or at sea?

Launch is from LC-36/11 at the cape, and landing is to be on an 'ocean-going platform' 750 nautical miles downrange. 

[Kryten]

 A couple well-timed announcements from other providers; ILS (who handle the commercial side of Proton launches) have announced two Proton variants, Proton-Medium and Proton-Light, to fly in 2018 and 2019 respectively. Proton-medium would have a comparable capacity to recoverable F9, and could potentially get a few payloads soon given SpaceX's current issues and ArianeSpace's packed manifest.

 ULA have also just announced what they call RapidLaunch™, a system to allow them to put up payloads as little as three months from customer order, and that they have space on their manifest for 2017. It's easy to imagine a few providers taking them up on their offer, especially as their prices have been improving; they have two commercial launches set for this year already.

Edited September 13, 2016 by Kryten

[mikegarrison]

21 minutes ago, wumpus said:

The economics make things more interesting.  Spacex put 19 boosters in the ocean before managing to recover their first one (and they still haven't launched a landed  booster).  If recovering boosters is the goal, I'd expect to go smaller in the idea that you can learn faster with cheaper boosters.  If launching large amounts of tonnage into space is the key, bigger is better and keep dumping the boosters until you learn how to land them.  Spacex almost certainly built the falcon 9 that size to allow sufficient cargo to pay for the landing attempts (throwing more tonnage to space is pointless if you don't have the customers).  If Blue Origin is less concerned with customers, then bigger is better.

One might argue that BO already did this -- they learned how to land rockets using (and reusing!) one that is quite a bit smaller than SpaceX. So now they know how to fly the rocket back down and land it. They only need to learn how to "boostback".

26 minutes ago, wumpus said:

One thing you shouldn't forget about are launch costs.  DC-X made huge strides in reducing launch costs and these probably carried over into New Shepard.

DC-X learned how to launch a test vehicle up about 100 feet, and did it a few times before crashing it. I challenge the accuracy of claiming that they "made huge strides in reducing launch costs".

[wumpus]

2 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

One might argue that BO already did this -- they learned how to land rockets using (and reusing!) one that is quite a bit smaller than SpaceX. So now they know how to fly the rocket back down and land it. They only need to learn how to "boostback".

Certainly way farther than spacex ever did with grasshopper.  And I was astonished to find that the first two falcon attempts involved parachutes (although I was certainly one of the many advocates of starting with parachute landings), so spacex had a much further path than I thought trying to use a powered landing on a booster designed to land with parachutes.

But it is certainly a lot more delta-v.  I wonder how much of a fraction the booster is going to deliver?  Falcon 9 delivers 1-2km/s, but appears to be designed around the "expendable mode" (which provides more like 6km/s).  If they want to "go big", I'd expect a pretty significant boostback (more than spacex's ~1km/s).

[tater]

From an economic standpoint I think the jump makes a certain amount of sense. I think Bezos is all-in for tourism, and that's not necessarily a bad idea.

In other threads, we've discussed the LEO launch market, and at some point I looked at a couple years of launches, and decided that only about a dozen were fully up for grabs for commercial launch providers. Slightly more for US providers given military payloads. Otherwise, national payloads tend to stick with national LVs (the Russians will not launch a Russian comsat on an F9, for example).

Those launches tend to be in the F9 bracket. Adding a new LV will get a share of that, but even all of it is a flat market. I also don't think that reduction of cost per kg to orbit will vastly increase the number (and mass) of satellites.

The only close to "bottomless" driver for LEO is tourism assuming the price can be made right. There are apparently ~12 million people on Earth with an investable wealth of over 1 million USD, and around 1200 who are billionaires. Clearly you need to be competitive for the former.

 

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

I took a trip to Hawthorne yesterday:

Spoiler

 

 

It's amazingly large, pictures don't really do it justice.

Also, hyperloop:

Spoiler

It's maybe getting some paint?

Spoiler

And a bit of interior:

Spoiler

And finally, this was sitting next to the F9:

Spoiler

 

[CatastrophicFailure]

21 minutes ago, Mad Rocket Scientist said:

I took a trip to Hawthorne yesterday:

  Hide contents

 

 

 

It's amazingly large, pictures don't really do it justice.

Also, hyperloop:

  Hide contents

 

It's maybe getting some paint?

  Hide contents

 

And a bit of interior:

  Hide contents

 

And finally, this was sitting next to the F9:

  Hide contents

 

 

Them Merlins clean up nice. 

[DerekL1963]

6 hours ago, softweir said:

Something to note from the news story is that it appears that critical systems are not sufficiently isolated across launch pads. If an explosion on one pad can cause knock-on effects to systems on other pads then they need to be able to isolate things better.

It's not entirely clear, but it appears the fault wasn't entirely caused by lack of isolation (though they certainly wouldn't have helped), but was contributed to by the emergency operations team continuing to pump water to pad 40.

[mikegarrison]

4 hours ago, DerekL1963 said:

It's not entirely clear, but it appears the fault wasn't entirely caused by lack of isolation (though they certainly wouldn't have helped), but was contributed to by the emergency operations team continuing to pump water to pad 40.

No, he said in the story that the explosion damaged the water-flooding system and in order to get it to shut off they had to manually close valves at the site.

[magnemoe]

10 hours ago, wumpus said:

Certainly way farther than spacex ever did with grasshopper.  And I was astonished to find that the first two falcon attempts involved parachutes (although I was certainly one of the many advocates of starting with parachute landings), so spacex had a much further path than I thought trying to use a powered landing on a booster designed to land with parachutes.

But it is certainly a lot more delta-v.  I wonder how much of a fraction the booster is going to deliver?  Falcon 9 delivers 1-2km/s, but appears to be designed around the "expendable mode" (which provides more like 6km/s).  If they want to "go big", I'd expect a pretty significant boostback (more than spacex's ~1km/s).

Yes, however SpaceX started with an working rocket then integrated return of first stage into it. 
This was an side project to launching rockets. 

Yes now we know it works so it makes sense to make an new rocket reusable. 

Think most first stages give 1-2 km/s, then you let the lower twr second stage take over. 
The difference in size of first stage between falcon 9 1.0 and 1.1 is the extra fuel needed for boostback and landing. 
An 6 km/s first stage gives no sense that is unless this includes SRB making it 3 stages in practice. 
 

9 hours ago, tater said:

From an economic standpoint I think the jump makes a certain amount of sense. I think Bezos is all-in for tourism, and that's not necessarily a bad idea.

In other threads, we've discussed the LEO launch market, and at some point I looked at a couple years of launches, and decided that only about a dozen were fully up for grabs for commercial launch providers. Slightly more for US providers given military payloads. Otherwise, national payloads tend to stick with national LVs (the Russians will not launch a Russian comsat on an F9, for example).

Those launches tend to be in the F9 bracket. Adding a new LV will get a share of that, but even all of it is a flat market. I also don't think that reduction of cost per kg to orbit will vastly increase the number (and mass) of satellites.

The only close to "bottomless" driver for LEO is tourism assuming the price can be made right. There are apparently ~12 million people on Earth with an investable wealth of over 1 million USD, and around 1200 who are billionaires. Clearly you need to be competitive for the former.

Yes, another benefit of an larger rocket is that its easier to reuse second stage, this is even more critical for tourism who is an far more price sensitive marked than satellites where the satellite tend to be more expensive than the launch. 
Also the falcon 9 sized payload is probably more of an industry standard for high capacity comsats, size of them has been slowly increasing. For other types of satellites you don't want it larger than you need so they tend to grow smaller, but it looks like many GEO comsats is build as large as practical. 

[A Fuzzy Velociraptor]

By end of the decade do they mean 2020 or 2026/7? Because one is very feasible and one seems rather ridculous, While they are secretive, certainly, I do not think they can reasonably expect to complete such a large vehicle in three years time. It seems a very significant jump from their current capabilities (and hopefully they have a payload planned for it because there really arent a lot of things that would use such a vehicle that I know of). I suppose they could be doing the spacex thing of building hype and being singifcantly late on their promised delivery date. It looks pretty and I wish them luck but I am very sceptical.

Also for the person questioning with the fins. Rockets in general are unstable and can be approximated as a reverse pendulum in terms of keeping them balanced, The center of pressure for most rockets is at or very near the nose. The fins in that case would not decrease stability because they would likely move the center of pressure back slightly, however the rocket itself spends little time in the atmosphere where aerodynamic stabilization is relevant that the fins make little difference.  

Edited September 14, 2016 by A Fuzzy Velociraptor

[kerbiloid]

New Glenn legs look shorter than Falcon's. Probably requires better precision.

[Mitchz95]

Interesting... apparently NASA Administrator Bolden isn't a fan of the private sector building heavy-lift rockets.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/09/nasa-chief-says-hes-not-a-big-fan-of-private-investment-in-large-rockets/

[Spaceception]

20 minutes ago, Mitchz95 said:

Interesting... apparently NASA Administrator Bolden isn't a fan of the private sector building heavy-lift rockets.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/09/nasa-chief-says-hes-not-a-big-fan-of-private-investment-in-large-rockets/

Of course not! It might get the SLS mothballed.

EDIT: Reading through the comments raised an excellent point.

:I think the vast majority of people who don't watch every hearing and read through all the minutia every day don't realize what a tightrope Charles Bolden walks on SLS.

He's been ordered by Congress to build SLS, and he's continually accused by Congress (and SLS fans) of slow-walking the program. Congress holds the purse strings, and if Bolden can't convince them he's doing his utmost to make sure SLS is built, they cut his programs.

If SLS doesn't succeed, Congress won't say, "Ya know, we shoved this rocket down NASA's throat, so it's not really their fault; it's ours." Nope. If SLS fails, Congress gets to blame the Administrator, his staff, the President, his political party, and most of all, the agency. Most importantly, Congress has been threatening to take over the appointment of the agency's officers. I presume that would mean they could choose an administrator who favors their particular programs.

So, knowing all of this, Charlie Bolden cheers loudly for SLS every chance he gets. And having seen a little bit of what's going on, , I would absolutely do the same, for the Agency's sake."

Edited September 14, 2016 by Spaceception
I was wrong :p

[_Augustus_]

40 minutes ago, Spaceception said:

Of course not! It might get the SLS mothballed.

EDIT: Reading through the comments raised an excellent point.

:I think the vast majority of people who don't watch every hearing and read through all the minutia every day don't realize what a tightrope Charles Bolden walks on SLS.

He's been ordered by Congress to build SLS, and he's continually accused by Congress (and SLS fans) of slow-walking the program. Congress holds the purse strings, and if Bolden can't convince them he's doing his utmost to make sure SLS is built, they cut his programs.

If SLS doesn't succeed, Congress won't say, "Ya know, we shoved this rocket down NASA's throat, so it's not really their fault; it's ours." Nope. If SLS fails, Congress gets to blame the Administrator, his staff, the President, his political party, and most of all, the agency. Most importantly, Congress has been threatening to take over the appointment of the agency's officers. I presume that would mean they could choose an administrator who favors their particular programs.

So, knowing all of this, Charlie Bolden cheers loudly for SLS every chance he gets. And having seen a little bit of what's going on, , I would absolutely do the same, for the Agency's sake."

As I've said before, none of the currently-in-development heavy lift LV's look to exceed 70 mT to LEO. The Mars Ascent Vehicle designs are all too big to be launched to Mars by anything but SLS, and even then they require ISRU to take off again.

UPDATE:

So apparently according to a guy that simulated the New Glenn in RSS/RO, the payload capacity of New Glenn is 48 mT to LEO, which is actually LESS than the Vulcan Heavy or Falcon Heavy.

Edited September 14, 2016 by _Augustus_

[Steel]

2 hours ago, _Augustus_ said:

So apparently according to a guy that simulated the New Glenn in RSS/RO, the payload capacity of New Glenn is 48 mT to LEO, which is actually LESS than the Vulcan Heavy or Falcon Heavy.

So the real payload will be that +/- 100% or so

[_Augustus_]

20 minutes ago, Steel said:

So the real payload will be that +/- 100% or so

I just tested myself and the figures are indeed correct.

Also, using New Glenn first stages as side boosters on SLS would allow 150 mT to LEO... anyone?

Edited September 14, 2016 by _Augustus_

[tater]

I've seen other speculation putting NG2 at around 40 tons to LEO, so it doesn't seem unreasonable.

I think a bigger issue is the 7m fairing, honestly. It doesn't do much good to be able to lift more if there are not payloads that mass enough that fit in the fairing.